From the Journal of Medical Ethics, which declares itself the "Highest ranked journal globally in Medical Ethics,"
For many years now, social and political struggles over the issue of abortion have given practical urgency to philosophical debate about whether human zygotes, embryos and fetuses have moral rights, such as a right not to be destroyed or discarded (loosely, a "right to life"). Current anxieties about the creation and destruction of human embryos for the purpose of scientific research on embryonic stem cells have added to this sense of urgency.
I argue here that embryos do not have interests, or in any event they have none that we are morally obliged to further, and that we should reject the idea that embryos have a right to life. I am well aware, however, that anyone arguing for such a position faces the possible embarrassment that it is difficult to draw a bright moral line between (on the one hand) the destruction of an embryo or a fetus and (on the other) infanticide. If a right to life is said to depend upon personhood, then a newborn baby does not have any such rights. Newborn babies, after all, do not seem to be fully self aware, or to be persons.
Yet most people have the strong intuition that infanticide is morally wrong.
If we are going to condemn infanticide, the most obvious ground seems to be the potential of a newborn baby to develop into a person. If we accepted that this gave a newborn baby a right to
life, why would we not be committed to the proposition that embryos also have a right to life?
Conversely, we could deny that potentiality gives embryos a right to life, relying, as Peter Singer does, on the claim that ‘‘A is a potential X’’ fails to establish that ‘‘A has the rights of an X’’,2 but this applies to newborn babies as much as to embryos.
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For the moment, let us stay on Earth.
(emphasis mine)
Oh, please, let's do stay on Earth, since we are the (only) ones having this conversation.
This article (Free Abstract only, full article requires subscription) is published under the heading of "Research Ethics," and written by Russell Blackford, of the School of Philosophy and Bioethics, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, Victoria, Australia. Russell supposes two worlds, with different values given to their embryos, the Ovoids One and Ovoids Two.
One problem is that Russell seems to define "rights" as positive rights, rather than negative rights. Negative rights are more appropriate because they only restrict certain actions, rather than forcing certain other actions. In other words, you have the right to expect me not to kill you, enslave you, or take your property, even if it causes me trouble - up to my own death, enslavement or loss of property. You do not have the right to expect me to feed you at my own expense, to make sure that you can move about and do whatever you want at my expense, or to expect me to make sure that you have tools or a house, etc., at my expense.
However, the major problem with the entire argument is that "persons" must possess an entire set of capabilities of function. "Persons" must be self-aware, conscious, and - even more:
. . . entities that are unable to suffer pain or frustration, have no forward looking subjective attachments to life, and do not know fear. We should not think of early embryos as having rights. Furthermore, there is no rational justification for thinking of them in the emotionally charged and culturally rich ways that we inevitably think of babies and young children.
Stem cell research should get a green light in all the various nations and jurisdictions on the worlds of the Ovoids. The people there have every reason to discover new, effective therapies, and no good reason to attribute a right to life to insentient entities at a very early stage of development. Here on Earth, the same reasons apply.
Far too much assumption, here.
A better analogy (here on Earth) is to ask whether a man stranded alone on a desert island is a person. Let's call him "Robinson Crusoe."
In this case, we would need to suppose that when he washed up on shore, Rob has amnesia and a memory span of a few minutes so he seems to function instinctually. He walks, speaks, eats food put in front of him and covers himself. But he doesn't remember what happened five minutes ago, doesn't fear death, and can't learn.(This could happen - and has - in Texas, on Earth, after head injuries and strokes.)
Does he have the right to life when Friday - and, in our scenario, Friday's whole village - decide that Rob would benefit the village by becoming part of their next meal?
Rob seems happy and doesn't bother the Fridays. He can't understand the Friday language or remember anything for more than a few minutes. Most of the time, he walks the beach or forages in the jungle, and so far, he's been eating the right fruits and hasn't done any damage. But, if they ignore him and let nature take its course, he may fall off a cliff, starve to death or eat the wrong fruit.
The Fridays have contact with other people from other villages and islands. They have seen head injuries before and speculate that Rob might become sane (regain his short term memory, etc.), learn to communicate with them and then become someone who is self aware, fears death enough to avoid new fruit and the cliffs, someone the Fridays care about and even a benefit that outweighs the value of meat.
Of course, Rob has the right to life. Or to put it more accurately, Friday and his family do not have the right to intentionally act to end Rob's life unless he acts in such a way as to be a threat to their life.
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